Nexus Earth Newsletter November 2018

It has been a very productive month for Nexus with the commitment of many new lines of code for the Tritium upgrade, ambassadors attending conferences, engineers meeting at the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the continued development of our distributed Embassy structure. The developers are also continuing to improve the Tritium Wallet and gearing up for the next set of beta testing.

Tritium Development Update

Most of the foundational developments of Tritium are complete. Recent tests of the Lower Level Library (LLL) show requests reaching 197,744 per second, and the Lower Level Database (LLD) handling the workloads handed to it when testing Lower Level Crypto (LLC) verification at over 4k tx/s.

The Nexus developers are at the stage of weaving together code over the network, establishing local databases to handle Signature Chains and register indexes, and adding lower level RPC commands to interact with the Ledger, with the higher level API being the interface in the command set.

Jack McGowen, a new Nexus developer, has been actively working with Scott Simon on the backend LLL-TAO Framework, cleaning up the code and helping to weave it together with the Tritium and Legacy code, into a live Tritium node (minus Tritium activated features) running over the live network. The code cleanup process has involved writing new code for existing functionality, and code comment-based documentation. A lot of the legacy code contained functionality from third party libraries such as boost. “We wrote new code to replace boost while maintaining the same functionality so now the code is less bloated and more portable. I got so excited about removing boost, that I removed it from the prime GPU miner as well,” said Jack. Moving forward, new users looking to build the code from source will no longer have to download boost. The team will use doxygen, an industry standard tool, to build an HTML format document from code comments that will be the foundation for learning for developers building on top of Nexus.

According to Colin Cantrell, in his latest TAO update, “Tritium will be released by the end of January, 2019. Yes , a timeline! As we have noticed over the last year, the removal of road maps and timelines didn’t do what was intended, it only created further uncertainty and rumors about the project. As we move into Chapter 3 of our history with distributed Embassies, new architecture, and distributed governance models, we felt it was appropriate to augment this with commitment from the development teams to set and meet deadlines.”

Signature Chains

The Nexus Tritium update implements Signature Chains (Sigchains) that create a unique cryptographic identity system, a key-management authorization system, and a proof-of-ownership device. This allows a user to safely transfer and prove ownership of assets and data through advanced contracts. When a user publishes, transfers, or leases data, an event is recorded. This allows for a relationship between users and transparent chains of events to be recorded. That relationship provides the utility of managing data and assets: titles, deeds, patents, currency, records, music, copyrights, trademarks, websites, etc.

Hash Wars

The Bitcoin Cash community went through yet another civil war where miners had to decide which new protocol upgrade to support with their hashing power. The two sides: Bitcoin Cash ABC (ABC) and Bitcoin Cash Satoshi’s Vision (SV), split on November 15th, 2018. Craig Steven Wright, leader of SV, threatened the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, promising he would use every miner that supports his chain to 51% attack ABC, followed by attacks on all other blockchains. Alas, the first hash war was anti-climatic as the majority of hash power turned out to be on the side of ABC. Of course, the situation may still change if there is shadow mining afoot.

During the conflict, Colin Cantrell shared his perspective on the hash wars, and reminded us that “we must take a moment to ask ourselves: “What is our vision?” And if our actions aren’t in accordance with this, we must find ways to support projects that are.”

World Crypto Conference

World Crypto Con was hosted in Las Vegas over Halloween week, and Nexus was a big part of the 10 year Bitcoin White Paper celebration. Nexus’ participation was funded by the community, and the event was staffed by Dionna and Anastasiya (US Embassy), Chris (Community Volunteer AU), and Cain (AU Embassy). Nexus sponsored the conference’s hackathon and the Bloqathon, which was hosted and organized by the Bloq team. Anastasiya gave an informative speech to the participating developers explaining the Tritium upgrade. Nexus also had a kiosk in a prime location, stacked with a 50 inch TV playing the wallet demo, and lots of Nexus swag. The team educated attendees about the Nexus technology along with our ledger layer scalability architecture. We want to thank everyone who stopped by to talk about the tech! A special thank you to community members Chris and Frank for going above and beyond to support the Nexus vision!

Blockchain Unbound: Tokyo

Nexus Ambassador, Dionna Bailey, attended the Blockchain Industries conference Blockchain Unbound: Tokyo. She was interviewed by several podcasts, participated in the Satoshi is Female & Women in Blockchain Luncheon, and connected with blockchain projects in Asia. Additionally, she represented Nexus in the Token Alliance Roundtable Tokyo where blockchain leaders in the Asian market discussed the current landscape of the industry and the challenges of regulatory changes. Among the attendees were the former commissioner of the SEC, NEO, Quoine, Huobi, Bittrex, Blockchain Industries, Perianne Boring, and Matt Roszak. As part of our membership in the Digital Chamber of Commerce, Nexus was featured on the front cover of Understanding Digital Tokens book given to legislators in the US and abroad.

Exploring Korea

As part of Nexus’ education initiative, the team has taken steps to expand into Korea. As a result, we now have our homepage live in Korean. There is also a dedicated Telegram channel for those in the community who want to get involved and keep up with news as well as a Twitter channel for public announcements. Future plans include meetups in Seoul as well as other initiatives to grow our international network.

New Nexus Hires

Jack McGowen (@BlackJack)

Jack McGowen has joined the Nexus Core Dev Team! Jack is relocating this month to the US office in Tempe, AZ to work closer with the team as a software engineer. He obtained his BSCS:RTIS (Real-Time Interactive Simulation) from DigiPen Institute of Technology April 2017 and joined the Nexus community shortly after, and has been an active community member for over a year.

Jack learned about the outdated prime miner software and began working on a new one. He found that his GPU programming skills translated nicely from computer graphics to high-performance computing or HPC. “Any miner is trying to solve a HPC problem, and so the problem felt like a natural fit for my skill set.” Jack successfully implemented a fast 1024-bit primality test using Montgomery modular multiplication, and offered a significant speedup from efficient use of GPU resources. “The Prime GPU Miner is rid of boost, OpenSSL, and libprimesieve; it only requires CUDA and GMP to build now.” He has plans to write an even more scalable miner as he continues R&D on an efficient prime mining algorithm, and is currently working on the backend LLL-TAO Framework.

Quý (@krysto)

Quý is a web developer with six years of experience and has been involved in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology since 2014 when he was first working with NEM. He was attracted to Nexus because of the innovative technology it introduces, as well as its ambitious goal, and believes he can help Nexus improve on the UI/UX side to bring its great tech closer to the users. In his free time, he enjoys music, Salsa and Bachata dancing, and playing board games.

UK MeetUp

Colin, Alex and Jules met up with some long-time community supporters and new faces in London, including @borris and @cryptosi who shared their welcomed wisdom, @kat who is helping to organize the Polish meetup, @supernova who works in the satellite industry and @danielsan, who created the brilliant Nexplorer.

Upcoming Events

November 16th-17th: Colin Cantrell will be at CryptoFinance conference in Oslo.

November 18th: Colin Cantrell and Alex El-Nemer will visit Warsaw, Poland. We invite you to our first Working Group Conference, an opportunity to hear Colin and Alex present and answer questions, and to participate in a Contract, Functionality and DAC working group.

We are excited to collaborate and explore further with all types of developers to extend the application space from the conventional OSI design to build on the Nexus Tritium Software Stack and hold regular working-group meetups with people from around the world.